Soap Use Encouraged to Keep Canadian Farms PED-Free

CANADA - A Red Deer-based swine veterinarian is encouraging pork producers who wash their own trailers to use soaps and disinfectants to ensure those vehicles are free of Porcine Epidemic Diarrhoea (PED), writes Bruce Cochrane.

As expected the number of PED positive sites has increased throughout the winter months bringing the number of primary cases across Canada to approximately 100.

Dr Egan Brockoff, a swine veterinarian with Prairie Swine Health Services, told those participating in Alberta Pork's monthly PED update that in general truck wash facilities are doing a good job, but they are finding trailers that aren't very well washed, so it's important for people on the farm to turn those trailers away.

Dr Egan Brockoff-Prairie Swine Health Services:

I've been to a number of different wash facilities and certainly I think in general facilities are doing a really good job if they're doing washes, but if you're doing your own washes we would still recommend using a soap just to help lift that organic matter off of the trailer side as easy as possible.

It just makes washing so much easier if you can use some soap.

I had a really good conversation this week with a pork producer about disinfectants and disinfectant choice.

We really want to remind people that we have good research on a number of disinfectants out there that work well with PED.

We know Virkon will work well with PED, we know Synergize will work well with PED, we know Accel will work well with PED and we've got research papers to support that.

There's a lot of choices out there and I just want to remind people that we do have some key research documents to support the use of some of these disinfectants and I think it's important that we don't lose track of some of that focus.

Dr Brockoff stressed that biosecurity doesn't just happen once, it has to happen every day. He said that it just takes one little slip, and we can find ourselves in a difficult situation bringing in this disease.